Dear Nick: When I read your piece in Partisan Review [Winter 1958] on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago I was struck by your enthusiasm for the novel (I had not yet read it), and puzzled by the fact that your very great …
ALGERIA: THE REALITIES, by Germaine Tillion. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1958. Germaine Tillion’s Algeria is a beautifully written, but seriously flawed, book. The author, an ethnologist and a leading French authority on the sociology of Algeria, has put together …
The Chinese “100 Flowers” or “rectification” episode— heralded as an Asian “thaw” when it was first announced in early 1957 —ended this winter with the fourth of the great purges which the Communist regime has conducted since coming to power …
MANY of us have been quite concerned about the financial status of college teachers, and the fact that non-academic commissions have been formed to investigate conditions and that citizens committees have been busily examining data with the apparent intention of …
“MANY a traveler has wondered why the Wameriku habitually sacrifice their lives to their curious ideas on traffic and mobility. As is well known, thousands yearly suffer death on the roads for no other reason than an apparent compulsion to …
February 7, 1935 The diary is not a literary form I am especially fond of; at the moment I would prefer the daily newspaper. But there is none available. … Cut off from political action, I am obliged to resort …
Bergson once wrote about the man who, when asked why he didn’t weep at a sermon which reduced everyone else to tears, replied: “I don’t belong to the parish.” Bergson felt that what that man had said of tears was …
Much of the potency of contemporary attacks on socialism lies not in the points they score against Marx’s ideas—since these points when valid could be made equally well, and often have been, by Marxists themselves—but in the fact that all …
Evidence of rather widespread disaffection or at least dissatisfaction among Russian writers has been frequently reported in recent years. We have heard of a number of attempts of Russian novelists, playwrights and critics to express in more or less veiled …
READERS OF DISSENT will know Edouard Roditi as an occasional contributor on Islamic problems. Others will remember him as an American poet and critic of literature and art. Born in Paris of an American family that has resided there for …
Down on the farm, as Stanford University’s campus is sometimes called, an atmosphere of the leisurely past is carefully cultivated. The campus itself, sprawling across acres of precious Peninsula real estate, seems to argue for days gone by when a …
“Fascism returns in Europe; generals in France, bishops in Italy.” So, a few days before May 25, the radical and anti-clerical weekly L’Espresso summarized the mood which characterized the last week of the election campaign. The election results confirmed this …
Reflections on Literature as a Minor Art I am setting down the following melancholy reflections not with any hope of a remedy, but because the matter is important and nobody else seems to be saying it. In many ways literature …
GHANA, by Kwame Nkrumah. On March 6, 1957, the former colony of the Gold Coast became an independent nation within the British Commonwealth and took the name of Ghana, thereby recalling a West African empire of medieval times. The leader …
